Once-polluted Water To Go Into Homes

The city of Fort Lauderdale next week plans to turn on a machine that will purify contaminated water so it can be pumped to about 5,000 homes in southwestern neighborhoods that use city water.

Starting Tuesday, the water will be piped to several city neighborhoods and unincorporated areas south of Broward Boulevard and west of Interstate 95, including Broadview Park, Melrose Park, Lauderdale Isles and Riverland Village.

Officials said a special cleansing process will ensure that no dangerous chemicals flow from household faucets.

"It is not a direct threat to the people," said Brad Jackson, who is supervising the project for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. "Their water supply is safe and it's being monitored."

The water will come from city wells that have been closed since 1986, when officials discovered they were contaminated with several industrial chemicals suspected of causing cancer.

The chemicals include vinyl chloride and tetrachloroethylene, which are associated with industrial degreasers and dry cleaning chemicals.

City and federal officials now want to start pumping and purifying the polluted water to stop the contamination from moving north and threatening clean water supplies.

To cleanse the water, the city is spending about $1 million on a purification system called an air stripper. The stripper is a concrete tube, about 40 feet high, that contains a plastic filter. Water will be pumped down while air is pumped up through the filter, jostling the chemicals out of the water.

The water will then be sent through the regular treatment process at the Peele-Dixie Water Treatment Plant before it is pumped to neighborhoods. Households in those areas now get their water from the plant, but it comes from uncontaminated wells.

Tests so far show that the procedure works. Analysts have been unable to detect any dangerous chemicals in the water coming out of the stripper, Jackson said.

The water will be tested weekly to make sure it remains clean. Tests will be taken as the water leaves the stripper and just before it is pumped to homes.

"We're ready to turn it on and let it do its thing," Jackson said. "We've done some start-up testing and it performs as designed: The water goes in dirty and comes out clean and meets all federal and state water quality standards."

Despite those assurances, some residents are uncomfortable with the idea.

"To me, once contaminated, always contaminated," said Tracey Buchanan, who lives in Broadview Park and said she will start buying bottled water. "They ought to ... get us clean water, normal water, not something that's already been contaminated."

The EPA is still searching for the source of the pollution in the wellfield, south of Peters Road and west of State Road 7.

The agency initially suspected an old dump that was once operated on the grounds of what is now Meadowbrook Elementary School, but has abandoned that theory.

The EPA is now looking at land to the south, near Interstate 595. Much of that property, once used for industry, is now owned by the state Department of Transportation.

If the EPA ever does settle on a source, the agency may go after the property owner to recover money spent on the investigation and cleanup. Jackson said the EPA has spent about $1.5 million on top of the $1 million the city will spend on the purification system.